ABSTRACT
Empire, the then still independent Marxist revolutionary Leon
Trotsky reserved some of his choicest epithets for the Union of
Russian People. These new patriots and nationalists were, he
maintained, composed of the ‘savage scum of the taverns and the
convict labour gangs’. They were the hirelings of Tsar Nicholas
II, a bunch of ‘pogromists and
thieves’, worthy agents of a
ruler who was himself ‘dull-
witted and scared, an all-
powerful nonentity, the prey
of prejudices worthy of an
Eskimo, the royal blood in his
veins poisoned by all the vices
of many generations’.1 Trotsky,
a self-consciously brilliant
young Jewish intellectual, was
marshalling his understandings and prejudices with care. Nation-
alists, and the monarch who in an emergency saw fit to fund them,
were brutal, uprooted, corrupt and stupid, no better than sav-
ages. Their ideas, their morality and their future were laughably
inferior to that of any decent Marxist and worker. They needed
to be opposed and destroyed as the world moved inexorably
towards its happier and international future. When Marxism
won its predestined global victory, the nations would wither away;
the era of their significance would prove fleeting. How did Marxists
entertain such hopes and why did they prove so delusive?
